Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Another politically-motivated killing in the US? Police are saying the motive for this oneis unclear:

"The chairman of the Democratic Party of Arkansas was killed Wednesday by a gunman who barged into the party's state headquarters and opened fire, police and Democratic leaders said.

Bill Gwatney "was shot multiple times" in the upper body and died of his wounds a few hours later, Little Rock police department Lieutenant Terry Hastings said in a briefing aired by FOX News." [...]

"Lieutenant Hastings said the motive for the shooting was unclear.

"That's something that we'll be looking into. Right now we don't have an answer for you on that," he said, adding that the suspect was not a former Gwatney employee.

Hastings said the suspect fled the scene in a pickup truck and was chased into Grant County some 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of Little Rock, where he was fatally shot.

The violent attack is the second in several months targeting the Democratic Party. In November a man claiming to be armed with a bomb took over US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton's campaign office in the state of New Hampshire and held five people hostage for more than five hours before surrendering."

Clinton's office, the Knoxville church killings a few weeks ago, now this -- if it's politically-motivated, which is by no means a given. There was speculation that the shooter was a disgruntled ex-employee at one of Gwatney's car dealerships, and oddly, the dealership's staff page is down ("staff" link at bottom of page). But police are saying he wasn't an employee, so at this point I'm going with "who knows?". Although I am starting to wonder why it seems to be all liberals getting attacked.

UPDATE (August 14): Still no real motive, but here's a little more about the shooter. He quit his job at a Target department store yesterday morning after his supervisor complained about graffiti he'd written on the wall there. Must resist the urge to wonder about what kind of graffiti it was... although, graffiti at the workplace doesn't sound like a particularly right-wing thing to do. It sounds more like a guy who just went nuts.